Justin Uberti – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchThu, 24 May 2018 17:25:15 +0000en-UShourly1WebRTC is growing fast: soon to surpass one billion deviceshttp://gigaom.com/2013/05/17/webrtc-one-billion-endpoints/
http://gigaom.com/2013/05/17/webrtc-one-billion-endpoints/#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 19:46:12 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=646680WebRTC, the new technology that enables plugin-free voice and video chat within the browser, should be available on more than one billion unique endpoints (think: desktop browsers and mobile devices) “within a week,” according to Google’s (s goog) WebRTC engineering lead Justin Uberti, who gave an update on WebRTC’s progress at Google I/O Friday.

WebRTC is going to reach that milestone thanks in part to Firefox 22, which was just released this week. The new version of Firefox comes with WebRTC enabled in its beta version, which should add a large number of users to the addressable market for WebRTC developers.

Uberti also said that WebRTC is going to come to iOS devices soon: Apple (s AAPL) hasn’t joined the efforts to implement and standardize WebRTC yet, but Google wants to nonetheless give developers a way to address users on iPads and iPhones through the release of a native toolkit.

Of course, there is another holdout: Microsoft (s MSFT) has been pushing forward with its own version of WebRTC, which some have seen as an effort to torpedo the standard. Uberti had a much more optimistic take on the differences Friday, saying that Microsoft has been “a great participant in the standards.” He added: “I’m very optimistic that we are going to see a version of (Internet Explorer) that supports this technology in the not-too distant future.”

“Chrome now includes the PeerConnection API, which allows developers to create web apps with real-time audio and video calling without the need for a plug-in. Together, PeerConnection and thegetUserMedia API represent the next steps in WebRTC, a new standard which aims to allow high quality video, audio, and data communications on the web.”

However, it is likely going to take some time before WebRTC becomes a widely adopted standard. Microsoft(s msft) publicly joined the WebRTC camp in August – but also slowed things down a bit by proposing a different approach than then one now implemented by Google.